


my words were cold and flat

by AslansCompass



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M, time lord letters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-28
Updated: 2015-11-28
Packaged: 2018-05-03 17:22:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5299985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AslansCompass/pseuds/AslansCompass
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Tenth Doctor left a letter for River Song in the Library database . Title from Michael Buble's "Home"</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. there isn't a good in goodbye

**Author's Note:**

> Letter based on #40 in the Time Lord Letters anthology

River walked into her virtual flat to find an envelope sitting on the kitchen table.  No postmark or return address, just her name, "River Song" in a clean sans serif typeface. Everything in here is just strings of ones' and zeroes' anyway--maybe she'll hack into the landscape parameters at some point, but it was all set to default after the data wipe. 

She picked it up, carefully slitting it open at one end. 

> River,
> 
> I'm sorry. It was the best I could do. I saved you. Except being saved isn't the same as being saved, is it?

The sentence should have ended in bold, or italics or underlined, but she understands anyway. This is the Doctor's apology, a posthumous letter of introduction.  Because it's from sideburns-and-converse, not bow tie or Scottish vowels.  The first three words were enough to tell her that.  Bow tie would have stumbled over himself three times before saying her name, and Scottish wouldn't bother with the apology. Oh, she knows the Doctor, even when he's not her Doctor, but there's a line between Doctor-as-thesis-subject and  _The Doctor,_  her husband.

> But I couldn't let you go. Whoever you really are.

_Please tell me you know who I  am._

Spent her whole life preparing for this day and it never was enough.

"The day is going to come when I'll look into that  man's eyes--my Doctor--and he won't have the faintest idea who I am. And I think it's going to kill me." She had told Rory that once, long before he knew who she was.  She regretted it later, during the long months tracking the Silence,  but old memories had been swirling in her head, merging past and present.  

Are all time travelers prophets?

> ....I hope you like your new world. I hope it's better than the alternative. But I couldn't let you die after all we've been through--you already, and for me yet to happen.

All we've been through? She wanted to laugh.  He didn't have a clue. He didn't.  He hadn't stood atop a pyramid at 5:02 p.m in an endless April 22, hadn't argued with a Tesselecta, hadn't even crash-landed in the garden of a little girl praying to Santa (because as far as a time traveler had a beginning,  that was hers.)  

And 'better than the alternative? '  She wasn't a little child to be frightened of the dark, nor a fragile human grasping to threescore years.  She had all the strengths and weaknesses of a Time Lord, all the resilience of her parents.  But that's what he did, he saved people, and apologized when he couldn't. And for others--for Anita,  Miss Evangelista, the Daves--it was enough.

She'd always known that he would be her death.  She'd never expected him to mourn her. But those were old expectations, formed in the days when he was her greatest enemy.  And for those days--those glorious, golden days--where he was hers and she was his, unconditionally--mortality was a trick, of no more consequence than changing clothes.   Not a one-way ticket to the pixelated cloud.

"Oh, my love," she whispered. "Not know me yet?"

 


	2. days like pages pressed together

They're having a party. Cal insisted on baking the cake herself, and it turned out just imperfectly enough to almost be real.  

"What are we celebrating?" Anita asked other Dave as they blew up balloons and hung streamers. 

"It's my birthday," Cal said. "I'm--" and she stopped in the middle of the sentence.  During the century of quarantine, she'd forgotten her data-stream nature, forgotten that most people keep growing up.  There was only today, and the vague sense that yesterday passed uneventfully. 

"Really?" Proper Dave said. "Because if I'm right, it's also been a year since we came here."

River managed not to snort. It might be a year. It might be five minutes. It might be three centuries. Dr. Moon isn't editing memories anymore, but strings of decimals are so malleable it hardly matters. Her Time Lord senses were, well,  not gone, but muted, thrown off by the compression and elasticity  of virtual reality.  "Fancy that." 

"Anyway, I have presents for you." Cal disappeared into the other room and returned with five brightly colored bundles. "I know it's the other way round, but I thought I'd try something knew." She handed them out one by one. 

River's package was small, barely bigger than her hands, and wrapped in soft black cloth. Underneath was a familiar volume bound in blue leather: her diary.  She flipped it open and her breath stuck in her through.  Everything was just as she remembered it, hastily scrawled notes, scraps of paper, even tea stains and  sand grains. "How did you?"

"I got Dr. Moon to project a hologram to find your diary and scan it."

So he'd left it here.   "Where was it?"

"On the balcony by biographies."  

She ran her finger over the cracked spine. "Thank you."

* * *

 

She didn't need to read it to remember, but she found herself curled up in bed,  devouring the stories as if they'd happened to someone else. As if she didn't know how it would end.  Early notes on piloting the TARDIS, drawings of his faces, accounts of Jim the Fish and that night at the bar.  She paused for a moment on the account of Lake Silencio, the second go-round (she still didn't remember the first. Only as a story told, a charge filed.)

> Look, I don’t mind lying (heaven knows, he and I would have no kind of relationship without it), but I don’t like telling someone else’s untruths. If he pulls something like this again, I will take that blessed bow tie and wring his neck with it.

The lies she'd told that day--were they her lies? His lies? Or just their lies, the lies that held them together when the truth was too dangerous, too hard, or just too uncomfortable? She had never been one for backwards glances, for second-guessing herself, but now she had all the time in the world for regrets. What, did she think she was immune from consequences?  Run and run and run, but eventually the past catches up and becomes the present. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Diary entries from the Eternity Clock game.


End file.
